Thomas Hawk

Zooomr is no longer a conflict of interest since he no longer works there. Zooomr has been closed to new registrations for ~2 years. He has never stopped using Flickr, and still thought Flickr was great when he went to Zooomr: http://thomashawk.com/2006/06/why-im-going-to-work-for-zooomr.html

"... I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery ..." If you want to read about the precise, analytical technology that by and large has been solved - yesterdays news then try Cal Hendersons blog ~ http://iamcal.com/talks Hendo has some excellent talks on massive scaling, unicode filtering, how to build cheap & fast, etc. If you want to read about the messy, yet to be solved problems that could really use a technological hand this is the type of article you should be reading. Once the most of the easier technical problems are solved you are left with the hard ones to solve ones. Well written stories like this one about those "messy, hard to predict humans" and their complex interactions in Web Apps as big as Flickr are unexplored territory. Read here for more on this thread: - http://thomashawk.com/2008/10/use-swear-word-in-private-email-at.html - http://digg.com/arts_culture/Potty_mouthery_deletion_at_Flickr?t=19416… - http://yaniv.golan.name/blog/2008/09/22/you-may-or-may-not-be-aware/

No thanks. He'll probably fabricate something I've said, as he did with Robert Scoble. [1] 1. http://thomashawk.com/2005/11/andrew-orlowski-and-register-bad.html

a lot of governments actually have a policy which sounds like "Exempting food sales but taxing prepared food sold for immediate consumption unless it is take-out except taxing hot take-out." This sort of thing is absolutely true here in SF. For example, buying a sandwich at Subway doesn't usually incur a sales tax. But answer "yes" to "Would you like it toasted?" and suddenly your $5 footlong is now ~$5.50 courtesy the State of California. See http://thomashawk.com/2008/06/cheap-bastard-says-dont-order-your-bread…

Many of you have been discussing speed, but one of the things I liked most about the old GMail was the look. This is surprising, because my taste tends toward minimalism and the muted colors of today. GMail used of a variety of colors (blue, green, orange, etc.) but there was an elegance to them. It's not just blue, it's a very specific shade of blue (#C3D9FF). The confirmation messages aren't just "orange," they're #FAD163. I've spent my whole life in art and have been a graphic designer, and these colors seem to me hand-picked for maximal retinal happiness. The style was not just in GMail but also Calendar, Google News, Reader, and the main search itself. For a while Google hosted the articles for the Associated Press, and I looked for them among the versions of each story in Google News. The width of the text column seemed to me precisely right. The image carousel, when included, was easy to use and lightweight compared to the monstrosities in other news sites. I always ascribed it to Google's data-driven design decisions. In 2009 a well-known graphic designer quit Google shortly after starting, because Google made him user-test every tweak. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better." (https://www.cnet.com/news/google-designer-leaves-blaming-data-centrism… But I also think a lot of credit goes to Kevin Fox, Senior User Experience Design Lead, 2003-8…

It's important to read Creative Commons licenses carefully: some grant other people the right to make money off of your original work in ways you never envisioned, without any compensation to you. Photographer Thomas Hawk wrote, correctly: "If you are going to license your photos Creative Commons with no restriction, then you ought to be prepared for this type of use. If it’s not Flickr selling them, anyone else can, legally. If you are uncomfortable with this idea, then you should not use Creative Commons without any sort of restriction."[1] The photographers who are now upset apparently never read those licenses. And they're irrevocable, according to Creative Commons itself[2], meaning there's no legal recourse if someone wants to sell coffee mugs or T-Shirts with your CC-BY or CC-BY-SA-licensed photos. To Yahoo's credit, they are voluntarily allowing photographers to opt-out. (What's interesting is that of the 14 photographers interviewed by the WSJ in the linked article, 8 actually didn't care. I would have guessed that number would have been higher.) This is a separate issue from the "handpicked" Flickr photos, with a 51% revenue split. The actual Yahoo announcement[3] says the handpicked rev-share option is "invite-only," so presumably photographers who opt-in are okay with the terms. Legality aside, I suspect Yahoo will regret this move. Seems to me that the negatives outweigh the revenue (especially since anyone can also offer CC prints), and users may view it…